Not to be cited or quoted without written permission.
All rights reserved by Robert L Hall.

THE KING WITHOUT A CROWN premiered in Green
Bay, Wisconsin, in 1937. I do not believe that any other
motion picture had premiered in Green Bay before or
has since. It was only a historical 'short', one of a series
of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer films created to intrigue the
public with alternative interpretations of history. Today
we argue over such topics as the 'one man' versus the
'conspiracy' theory of the assassination of President
Kennedy. Then it was, "Did the real assassin of
President Lincoln die in the burning barn or someone
else?" and, "Did the little prince, the dauphin, son of
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, really die while under
house arrest, or was he spirited away to America and
raised among the Mohawk Indians of Canada, later to
become an Episcopal missionary to the Oneidas?" The King Without a Crown premiered in Green Bay,
and after an introduction set in Revolutionary France
the scenes shifted to a little frontier town in Wisconsin,
a Green Bay I had never known, with rutted dirt streets,
false front stores, and hitching posts. I was ten years
old, accompanied to the theater by my grandmother,
who was inclined to believe that there might be
something in the story that Priest Williams had indeed
been the rightful heir to the throne of France, the Lost
Dauphin. Her grandfather Bennett, as a six-year-old
Stockbridge boy with his family, had followed Williams
and the New York Indians west to Wisconsin in 1829,
migrating with some of the Stockbridges who left New
York State to resettle near Kaukauna, just south of the
Oneidas. I could not have guessed then, in 1937, that
ten years after seeing the movie I would know Eleazer
Williams closely, too--that I would be assisting in
preparing Eleazer Williams bones for reburial at Oneida,
Wisconsin--touching history with my own hands.
The story of Eleazer Williams began no less
dramatically than it ended. 1704 was a leap year. At
daybreak on February 29 of that year, leap year day, the
young girl who would become Williams' great
grandmother, Eunice Williams, was taken captive with
her family and 110 others during the destructive raid
against the Massachusetts frontier settlement of Deerfield. This
was during the period of Queen Anne's War
(1702-1713), one of the several military contests between
New France and New England which expressed itself in
surprise French and Indian strikes against Puritan
English settlements.
The Deerfield raiding party included fifty
Canadians and 200 Indians--Abenakis and
Caughnawaga Mohawks--led by Major Hertel de
Rouville. The attack entered the history books as the
Deerfield Massacre because of the near completeness of
the action. Some fifty-three settlers were killed and
seventeen houses burned. Most of the captives were
eventually ransomed and repatriated to New England,
but Eunice Williams was not one of those. She chose to
stay with the Indians in Catholic Canada. For her Puritan
minister father and others of the same faith Eunice
Williams became the Unredeemed
Captive--unredeemed in body and unredeemed in soul.
Eunice Williams' father, John, saw their capture in
1704 as a divine rebuke and interpreted his release
nearly three years later as an example of divine mercy.
1 It was common in the New England of
that day to read supernatural control into the minutest
day-to-day events of life, and in that sense the New
Englanders had much in common with the Indians that
lived among and around them. The New Englanders
would not have appreciated such a comparison, of
course, because they thought of the unchristianized
Indians as worshippers of devils. William Hubbard, for
one, saw misfortunes in Indian relations as punishment
inflicted upon the English by "God [who] hath been
provoked to let loose the rage of the heathens against
us" when the New Englanders neglected their
religion.2 By the same token, the Puritans
saw the deaths of thousands of Indians from disease as
manifestations of the divine will of the Puritans' God.
Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
reasoned, "if God were not pleased with our inheriting
these parts, why did he drive out the native before? and
why dothe he still make roome for us, by deminishinge
[the Indians] as we increase?"3
For Indians and Puritans alike, events did not just
happen or evolve through chains of impersonal
circumstance; they were willed, as these words of John
Williams indicate:

On the twenty-ninth of
February, 1703/4, not long before break of day,
the enemy came in like a flood upon us.... They
came to my house in the beginning of the onset
and, by their violent endeavors to break open
doors and windows with axes and hatchets,
awakened me out of my sleep; on which I
leaped out of bed, and running toward the
door, perceived the enemy making their
entrance into the house. I called to awaken two
soldiers in the chamber and returned toward my
bedside for my arms. The enemy immediately
brake into the room, I judge to the number of
twenty, with painted faces and hideous
acclamations.... Taking down my pistol, I
cocked it and put it to the breast of the first
Indian who came up, but my pistol missing fire,
I was seized by three Indians who disarmed me and bound me.... My pistol missing fire was an
occasion of my life's being preserved, since
which I have also found it profitable to be
crossed in my own will. The judgment of God
did not long slumber against one of the three
which took me, who was a captain [chief], for
by sunrising he received a mortal shot... 4

[March 8, en route to Canada] we were made to
scatter one from another into smaller
companies, and one of my children [was]
carried away with Indians belonging to the
Eastern parts [Abenakis]. At night my master
came to me with my pistol in his hand, and put
it to my breast, and said, "Now I will kill you,
for," said he, "at your house you would have
killed me with it if you could." But by the grace
of God I was not much daunted, and whatever
his intention might be, God prevented my
death.5

John Williams' life was first saved, he believed,
because his god intervened to cause his pistol to
misfire, crossing Williams' intention to shoot his
attacker. God again interceded on Williams' behalf on
the ninth day when he caused his captor to change his
mind about killing his prisoner. Williams' wife Eunice
was tomahawked and killed on the second day of travel
after she had completely drenched herself in icy water
by falling while crossing a river. She had also been
failing in her strength from having given birth just two
weeks earlier and had become a liability. Williams
appears to have believed her death to be a divine
reproach to himself mediated by his Indian captors
6 As harsh as the conditions of the
forced march to Canada
were, traveling through deep snow and frozen streams
in winter, Williams admitted that at least a day never
passed that his captors did not provide him with food,
although others were not nearly as fortunate. Not very
surprisingly, Williams attributed his own fortune to the
"goodness of God" and not to the goodness nor even
the self interest of his Indian captors.
Eight weeks after his capture John Williams arrived
in Montreal, where Governor Vaudreuil purchased his
release from his two Indian owners and set him up with
his own quarters and fed him at his own table. The
French governor explained that Williams was now a
hostage for the release of the privateer captain Pierre
Maisonnat captured by the English in 1702. Williams
would be released when the English returned the
privateer, or 'pirate' as the New Englanders preferred to
think of him. Williams was someone to bargain for,
being the minister of the Deerfield congregation. The
exchange was made in 1706 and Williams went back to
Massachusetts.7
Four of John Williams family that had not died
during the original raid on Deerfield or on the trail to
Canada were redeemed from captivity among the French
and Indians, all, that is, except the youngest daughter,
seven-year-old Eunice. Not even the intercession of
Governor Vaudreuil could convince her Indian captors
to set her free. She was being held at the Iroquois town
of Caughnawaga in Quebec, across the St. Lawrence
River from Montreal. 8 At first she
resisted the attempts to convert her to Catholicism, but
by the time peace was negotiated between England and
France in 1713 she had been in Canada nine years, had
accepted the Roman faith, been baptized Margaret, and
was married to a Mohawk Indian of Caughnawaga.
9 Caughnawaga was also a mission of the
Jesuits fathers and the Caughnawagas were regarded as
praying Indians.
Eunice Williams' Indian husband took the name
Williams himself and passed the name on to their
children John, Catherine, and Sarah. Eunice died in 1786
at age 90. Only Sarah had children, but who her husband
was, no one may ever be able to really say. Sarah's son
Thomas Williams was the father of Eleazer Williams, and
although Eleazer wrote a biography of his father, who
became a well known St. Regis Mohawk chief, Eleazer
left an equivocal record of who Thomas Williams' father
was. Eleazer seemed to be driven to emphasize a
European identity at the expense of his Indian identity,
even to the point of creating impossibly contradictory
backgrounds. While at one point in his life he merely
created a grandfather Williams who was an English
surgeon, at a later time he claimed a French grandfather
of royal lineage and completely disavowed a blood
relationship even to the Williams family of
Deerfield, Massachusetts. His actual grandfather
Williams was probably a Caughnawaga Indian who
took his wife's English name as his own, as had Eunice
Williams' Indian husband years earlier.
The Williams clan in Massachusetts never gave up
trying to obtain Eunice's return, and after her, that of her
children, until finally in 1800 Eleazer and a brother were
allowed to travel to Massachusetts for English
schooling. This was not just a friendly gesture between
related families. The children's expenses were paid by
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions and the State of Massachusetts. Giving these
children a Protestant upbringing in New England " was
in an important sense the fulfillment of a mission: having
failed to reclaim Eunice, the righteous succeeded at
least in redeeming her posterity." 10
The most perceptive analysis of Eleazer Williams'
character which I have found is that of Geoffrey
Buerger.11 Buerger sees Eleazer, on the
one hand, relishing the attention given to him as a
descendent of the very famous Eunice Williams and, on
the other hand, seeking to relegate to the background
his Indian ancestry. After all, Eunice Williams had been
the great niece of Increase Mather, minister of the
North Church, Boston, and president of Harvard
College, and she was a cousin of Cotton Mather, one of
the most famous of New England minister-authors who
was also involved importantly in the founding of Yale
College. As an Indian Eleazer Williams was little more
than a family curiosity.
Not without some grounds for believing so, Eleazer
apparently saw himself on the road to a career in the
Congregational ministry. First Yale, perhaps, or
Harvard. Then finally a pulpit where he could exhort the
elite of New England society to greater piety. Instead,
he discovered in 1807, when he arrived at the institution
of higher learning that he had been sent to after seven
years of preparation, that it was a charity school for
Indians. Buerger sees this as a critical event in Williams'
life. Williams remained there, at Moor's Charity School
in New Hampshire, for a single week, then returned to
Massachusetts. During his stay at Moor's Eleazer must
have come to realize, Buerger feels, just what his New
England patrons really thought of him--that he would
always remain a rehabilitated savage in their minds no
matter what level of education or repetoire of social
graces he might acquire.12 If he was to satisfy the great
expectations he had for himself, he
could not depend upon others to create opportunities
for him.
In 1811, four years after leaving Moor's, we find
Eleazer on his way to the Caughnawaga Reserve in
Canada where his family lived. In 1812 war was declared
between the United States and Great Britain. During the
war Eleazer was employed in what we would now call
'undercover operations', collecting information on
British troop movements through his Indian contacts,
and he also apparently served in a ranger unit. For this
activity he was commended by his
officers.13 He received a slight wound
during the Battle of Plattsburg for which he was refused
a pension in 1851 for want of evidence of actual
disability.
There is nothing in any official records of the war
to substantiate Williams' more glorifying claims,
although secondary historical sources did sometimes
uncritically repeat his claims as fact. If we are to believe
Williams, at age twenty-five he was a colonel in the
American army, served as Superintendent General of
Indian Affairs for the northern border area, commanded
an artillery battery which figured importantly in the
Battle of Plattsburg in New York (when he was not
commanding a company of scouts or rangers in the
same battle), and conceived a trick which helped turn
the tide of that battle in favor of the United
States.14
In preparing his Pictorial Field Book of the War of
1812 Benson Lossing interviewed Eleazer Williams in
Hogansburg, New York, on the St. Regis Indian
Reservation. That was in 1855 at a time when Williams
had already become nationally known as a claimant to
the throne of France. Lossing was one of those who was
inclined to accept the idea that Williams was actually
Louis XVII.15 If he had been willing to
see Williams' alleged royal connections only as a pose,
Lossing might also have looked twice at the
undocumentable aspects of Williams' war record.
Lossing, for instance, printed as gospel the following
fabricated story, which gives more credit to Williams for
the hasty retreat of the British land forces at the Battle
of Plattsburg in 1814 than to Commodore Thomas
Macdonough and his thorough defeat of the British
fleet on Plattsburg Bay on the same day:

The late Reverend Eleazer Williams . . . who was
in the military service of the United States at
Plattsburg as commander of the Secret Corps of
Observation, informed me that Sir George [Prevost]
naturally timid, was intensely alarmed by a
clever trick arranged by Williams. Colonel
Fassett, of Vermont, came over from Burlington
on Friday before the battle, and assured
[American Gen. Alexander] Macomb that the
Vermont militia would cross the lake to aid him
in spite of Governor Chittenden. Williams
suggested to the general after Fassett left that
a letter from that officer, declaring that a heavy
body of the militia were about to cross the lake,
sent so as to fall into the hands of Prevost,
would have a salutary effect. Macomb directed
Williams to carry out the plan. He went over to
Burlington, and received from Fassett a letter
to Macomb, in which he said that Chittenden
was marching with ten thousand men for St.
Albans; that five thousand more were
marching from St. Lawrence County; and that
four thousand from Washington County were
in motion. This letter was placed in the hands
of a shrewd Irish woman on Cumberland Head,
who took it to Prevost. The alarmed Baronet
immediately ordered the flight spoken of in the
text, and at a little past midnight his whole army
was on the wing. 16

Williams says that he was too modest at the time to
make generally known his role in the success of the
United States at Plattsburg and then he immodestly
admits that although "the plan involved danger and
difficulty" it was trusted to a "judicious and sagacious"
hand--his own.17 That was in 1852 when
he gave the manuscript of his biography of his father to
Franklin B. Hough, who published it in 1859. The
account of Eleazer Williams' role in the Battle of
Plattsburg based on Williams' diary, given in Hanson's
The Lost Prince published in 1854, makes no mention of
the clever stratagem at all! 18
How would a historical novelist reconcile the idea
of this ruse with Williams' reputation for deception?
Did Williams really deceive the British or did he only
deceive Benson Lossing as a historian of the battle?
The story of the battles on land and on water at
Plattsburg was translated by Charles Muller into a novel
called The Proudest Day: Macdonough on Lake
Champlain in which Muller had to confront the
possibility that there was a trick actually played against
the British of which no other record existed except the
self aggrandizing statement of Williams after half a
century of modest silence. Muller hedged, accepting the
idea that there might have been a strategic trick played
on the British but attributing the idea to the hero of the
subtitle:

With word that Vermont volunteers had begun
to trickle into Plattsburg, the Commodore
[Macdonough] broached to Alex Macomb and
Lazare Williams an idea for harassing Prevost
at the most appropriate moment.
"Let's give him a dose of the same
medicine Brock gave Hull before he
surrendered," the Commodore suggested.
"You told us, Lazare, how Brock let Hull
intercept a faked message that frightened him
with news of Indians en route to Brock's
support. Why don't we let Prevost capture a
letter to General Macomb announcing twenty
thousand Vermont and New Hampshire troops
racing to his support?"
They agreed it might help, at a
psychological moment, and Aze Bellamy went
forthwith to Waterbury to request Mercy
Cobb, as a patriotic woman unknown to the
British, to stand by at Betsy Boyd's house in
Burlington ready to carry a prepared letter
when Eleazer Williams deemed the time right
for it to fall into Prevost's hands19

Muller was willing to handle more directly the
question of Williams' Indian ancestry, saying in
dialogue, "though unable to see beneath the table, the
Lieutenant felt certain that Eleazer Williams' feet--small
as his hands, no doubt--inevitably toed in.
Unquestionably, this man had much, if not all, Indian
blood."20 I infer from this that Muller's
homework on Williams had been extensive enough to
discover another little gem of Indian stereotyping,
provided by Albert Ellis, who observed that Williams,
"always made an effort in walking, to turn out his toes;
but forgetting it, he would, Indian-like, immediately turn
them in."21
The most telling evidence against Williams' claim to
royal blood was provided by his own mother Mary Ann
Williams, Konantewanteta in Mohawk. She was
interviewed in the fall of 1851 and was asked whether
Eleazer was her own child or merely a child brought to
her for care and adopted. The popular belief of French
royalists was that the little dauphin did not actually die
in prison but was transported in secrecy to America to
be raised far from harm. Konantewanteta and two aged
friends were asked to confirm or deny the story of
adoption.

One and all vehemently denounced the tale as a lie,
while the little old mother bursting into tears
exclaimed that she knew Eleazer had been a bad man
but she did not know before that he was bad enough
to deny his own mother.22

In the November following the Battle of Plattsburg
Williams renewed his acquaintances at Oneida Castle,
seat of the Oneida tribe of the Iroquois Six Nations in
New York. The following year he definitively broke all
denominational ties to his Puritan/Congreational
forebears, living relatives, and sponsors. May 21, 1815, he was
confirmed into the Episcopal Church, the American
counterpart of the Anglican Church or Church of
England. In 1816 he was once more among the Oneidas,
but this time as a religious teacher, lay reader, and
catechist, sponsored by John Henry Hobart, Bishop of
the Diocese of New York. Oneida was closely related to
Williams' native Mohawk language and he quickly
became a fluent speaker. This fluency, combined with
his personal charm and persuasiveness, rapidly
produced dramatic results among the Oneidas.
At the time of Williams' arrival among the Oneidas
the tribe was divided into a Christian Party or faction
and a so-called Pagan Party, which was the faction of
unconverted Oneidas. The already converted Oneidas
were eager to renew their relations to the church and
flocked to his services. Within a year the power of
Williams' words had touched the unconverted Oneidas
and they wrote to Governor De Witt Clinton declaring
that they wished no longer to remain known as the
Pagan Party, that they had abandoned their traditional
tribal sacrifices, that they were ready to "take the
Christian's God to be our God and our only hope of
salvation," and that in all subsequent communications
from the governor they wished to be addressed as the
Second Christian Party of the Oneida
Indians.23 The letter was signed by ten
or twelve chiefs and prominent men and dated January
25, 1817. According to Williams' associate Albert G.
Ellis, four-fifths of the Oneidas were nonchristian at the
time of Williams arrival:

Assuming a tone of authority, and demanding
of them to listen to a message to them from the
Great Spirit, [Williams] assembled them in the
open air, and challenged them either to obey or
refute the Gospel. In a few weeks the Pagan
party made a formal renunciation of
paganism.24

At this time and for over thirty years the Indians
who formerly resided at Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
had been living in New York as neighbors of the
Oneidas and at the invitation of the Oneidas. The pastor
of the Stockbridge Indians at New Stockbridge was
John Sergeant, son of the original minister to the
Stockbridges in the Housatonic valley of
Massachusetts. The move to New York had only
temporarily improved the relations of the Indians with
their white neighbors. In New York the Stockbridges
and the Oneidas alike were adapting successfully to
white ways but were surrounded by merchants, traders,
and land speculators causing problems for the Indians
and eager to acquire from the Indians the little land that
they had left. The solution which was reluctantly agreed
upon after much debate, for not only the Oneidas and
Stockbridges but also for the Munsees and
Brothertowns, then of the same location, was migration
westward to new reservations in Wisconsin.
As early as 1818 Williams had begun to cautiously
mention the possibility of a move of all of the Indians of
New York state, many from Canada, and the Senecas
then at Sandusky, to the vicinity of Green Bay,
Wisconsin, there to reorganize themselves into a grand
confederacy of Indian nations with a government in
which the role of the church would, of course, be
prominent.25

The dream of Mr. Williams . . . was that all the
remains of the Indian race in the territories of the
United States, should be there gathered [in
Wisconsin] into one vast community, where the
savage tribes might be won over to civilization
and Christianity, by intercourse with their
already civilized brethren.
26

The multiple forces acting for and against the idea
of migration are hard to describe briefly. Involved were
not only the many factions among the Indians in New
York and their white neighbors but also among the
Menominee and Winnebago Indians then living in
Wisconsin and their white neighbors, not to mention
the territorial government, the Federal government in
Washington, and the land companies that would profit. Williams associated himself with the factions favoring
the move. As Buerger has nicely phrased it, "If he did
not himself create the wave of migration, he rode its
crest."27
Following negotiations that allowed to the New
York Indians a small tract of land near Green Bay,
Eleazer Williams established his residence at Green Bay
in September of 1822. In 1823 about 150 Oneidas of the
First Christian Party and an equal number of
Stockbridges moved to the new home. Others followed
in later years.
In 1823 Williams married Madeleine Jourdain, later
known as Mary.28 Miss Jourdain was
engaged to be married to another man whose misfortune
it was to be temporarily away on business when
Williams came calling on the Jourdain father and mother.
Williams asked for their daughter's hand in marriage and
it was given. The bride to be was only fourteen years
old at the time. The customs of the day and the area
were such that Miss Jourdain did not hear of her
forthcoming wedding until she was told by her sister
that she "need not go to school that day, as she was to
be married to Priest Williams in the
evening!"29
Eleazer Williams was lucky in several respects. His
bride has been described as the belle of the Fox River
valley. and she came to the marriage with 4800 acres of
land as well--later known as the Williams Tract. Part of
this tract was later included within a Lost Dauphin
State Park along with a reconstruction of the log cabin
home of Eleazer Williams and his
family.30 Her father was Joseph Jourdain,
a blacksmith and an important man in the community.
Her mother was the granddaughter of a Menominee
chief.
Williams being Williams, it was not sufficient that
he reconstructed his own genealogy, he constructed a
set of new relations for his wife as well. To the author of
the Williams family genealogy he described his wife as
"a distant relative of the king of France from whom he
has been honored with several splendid gifts and
honors, among the rest a golden cross and star," and he
described her also as a relative of the Prince de
Joinville.31 When interviewed by
Stephan Williams in 1846 Eleazer explained that his
son John was away on a visit to the King of France at
the request of the king. That was on the eve of the story
that gave Eleazer notoriety as the Lost Dauphin.
Eleazer was ordained a deacon by Bishop Hobart in
1826. By1832, however, his association with the
Oneidas was dissolved at their request. Williams had
neglected his flock, seldom visiting them at their
location on Duck Creek west of Green Bay and
discouraging them from receiving the attention of pastors of other denominations.32 By
1842 Bishop Jackson Kemper forbade Williams from
representing the Episcopal Church in any capacity in
Wisconsin. 33 He lived on his wife's land
on the bank of the Fox River and at this time he must
have come increasingly to find amused comfort in his
deceptions. At a time when the few Indians and whites
who knew him well were no longer willing to accept him
for what he was, Williams found that there was a greater
number of whites who barely knew him who were willing
to accept him for what he was not. Already by 1839
he is said to have confided to George Haskins, editor of
the Buffalo [NY] Express, that he was the real lost prince
of France and related to him many of the details that
appeared in later stories, such as the amnesia of his
childhood. 34 Two years later an
opportunity arose that Williams could hardly pass up.
In 1841 the Prince de Joinville, third son of Louis
Philippe, King of France under the reestablished
monarchy, was touring Canada and the United States.
He was especially interested in retracing the water
routes that had figured importantly in the history of
colonial New France, and his travels were to take him to
Green Bay! Williams was in New York at the time and
learned of the prince's plans. When the prince's steamer
arrived at Mackinac, at the head of Lake Michigan,
Williams was already there and boarded the Columbia
for the rest of the trip to Green Bay. When the prince
asked Captain Shook for the names of any individuals
knowledgeable about the Indians of the Green Bay area,
who better could the captain suggest than Eleazer
Williams, who just happened to be aboard, and he introduced them.35
The above details of the prince's inquiry and
introduction to Williams were related to Morgan L.
Martin, a prominent citizen of Green Bay, by Captain
Shook. Williams himself entered a different story in his
journal. According to Williams, he took passage on the
ship when he heard that the prince was inquiring about
an Eleazer Williams of Green Bay, and the captain
subsequently introduced them:

I was sitting at the time on a barrel. The prince
not only started with evident and involuntary
surprise when he saw me but there was a great
agitation in his face and manner--a slight
paleness and quivering of the lip. . .
36

One may assume that Williams intended others to
believe that the prince was startled by Williams' facial
resemblance to the royal lineage. It was a practice of
Williams to make statements or create situations from
which others could draw conclusions that Williams only
implied by word or action. On two separate occasions in
different homes Williams feigned his dismay at seeing in a book the face of the dauphin's jailer Simon who had
been so cruel to the little dauphin in the Temple, the
priory of the Knights of Malta where the French royal
family was imprisoned. Both times Williams led his
audience to believe that he did not know who the
person was.

I saw Williams sitting upright and stiff in his
chair, his eyes fixed and wide open, his hands
clenched on the table, his whole frame shaking
and trembling as if paralysis had seized him....
Pointing to the wood-cut he said, "That image has
haunted me day and night, as long as I can
remember. 'Tis the horrid vision of my dreams;
what is it? Who is it?" 37

And six years later . . .

Good God, I know that face. it has haunted me
through life....38

In any case, Williams said that the next day the
Prince de Joinville told him in hushed confidence that
he, Williams, was the heir to the throne of France--a
revelation that left Williams, Williams said, overcome
with emotion. Williams said his surprise changed to
indignation when the prince then took out a parchment
engrossed in French and English and stamped with the
royal seals, and asked Williams to sign it to declare his
abdication from the throne of France in exchange for
certain entitlements and considerations. Williams went
on to say that after several hours contemplating the
document he told the prince that he, Williams, though
in poverty and exile, could not "barter away the rights
pertaining to him by his birth and sacrifice the interests
of his family, " after which the prince reportedly
accused Williams of ingratitude. Reacting quickly to
Joinville's loud tones Williams says that he put the
prince in his place and the prince afterward assumed a
properly respectful attitude toward Williams.39
Williams' fantasy of his confrontation with the
Prince de Joinville falls into a class with another
incident. In enlarging the importance of his activities in
the War of 1812 Williams created a dialogue between himself and Sir John Johnson in which, as Geoffrey
Buerger perceptively notes, Williams not only gave
himself the leading role on the American side but also
"imagined himself dealing with a British baronet on
terms of easy equality."40 Writing in the
third person, Williams informed his readers that Sir John
said "Williams argued like a young lion" in seeking the
neutrality of Indian tribes during the war.
In this reported--or purported--conversation
Williams took the side of civilization and humanity
against that of "the ruthless savages of the wilderness,
whose tender mercies are to be manifested by the
tomahawk and the scalping knife."41 His
long-time friend Albert G. Ellis tells us that he was once
in a room where Williams was shaving. Ellis says that
after admiring himself in the mirror Williams said, "See . .
. is this the face of a savage? How much Indian blood is
there? We will see. . . in time whether the Indian or the
white man prevails in this face."42
Williams was clearly sensitive about being perceived as
an Indian, but Ellis adds also that he believes Williams
never conceived the idea of pretending to be the
dauphin "until after his fall from the dizzy height he had
soared to in his dreams, as despot of an Indian
empire."43
As far back as his stay in Hanover, New
Hampshire, in 1807, Williams is said to have at least
played at the idea of being a French nobleman. A
companion of that time says that Williams "wore a tinsel
badge or star on his left breast and styled himself Count
de Lorraine."44 The definitive illusion
apparently did not take shape until 1847 or early 1848.
At that time Col. Henry Eastman, a lawyer in Green Bay,
for amusement wrote a fictional story about the fate of
the Bourbon royal family in which he inserted Eleazer
Williams as the Lost Dauphin, rightful heir to the throne of France,
living in a humble log cabin on the banks of the Fox
River.45 Since Green Bay as la Baye was
settled a century earlier from French speaking Canada
there were any number of models for the role of Lost
Dauphin in the community--many also living in humble
log cabins on the banks of the Fox River--and even
better models than Williams, since Eleazer's first
language was Mohawk and his command of the French
language was so deficient that his wife, the former
Madeleine Jourdain, suggested he not even try to speak
it.46
I find it hard to
imagine Eastman choosing Williams for the part of the
Lost Dauphin unless the idea had been at least
subliminally furnished him by Williams. In any case,
finding that Williams was flattered by his part in the
story Eastman allowed Williams to have the manuscript
for reading, he tells us, and then forgot about it until
1853 when

you were none of you so much astonished as I
when I went into Burley Follett's book store at
Green Bay, one day in 1853, and bought a
number of Putnam's Magazine, containing a
startling discovery of the mislaid Dauphin, in
my own language....47

The story in Putnam's Magazine was
written by the Rev. John Hanson, who had met
Williams by accident on a train in 1851 after
reading a news item in a New York newspaper
identifying Eleazer Williams as the Lost
Dauphin. Hanson was much taken by the story
and by Williams and soon produced the article
which appeared in the February, 1853, number
of Putnam's Magazine with the title
"Have we a Bourbon among
us?"48 Hanson followed this up
in 1854 with the full blown story in a book
entitled The Lost
Prince.49 The theme
struck the public's imagination.
Putnam's is said to have added 20,000
names to its list of subscribers after the
appearance of the article in
1853.50 The story was adapted
to other popular forms, one of them a novel
called Lazarre by Mary Hartwell
Catherwood in which we find a scene in which
Eleazer Williams is haunted bv images in a
book:

I got near enough without taking fright to see a book
spread open on the blanket, showing two
illuminated pages. Something parted in me. I saw
my mother, as I had seen her in some past life:-not
Marianne the Mohawk, wife of Thomas Williams,
but a fair oval-faced mother with arched brows. I
saw even her pointed waist and puffed skirts, and
the lace around her open neck....
I dropped on my knees and stretched my arms
above my head, crying aloud as women cry with
gasps and chokings in sudden bereavement.
Nebulous memories twisted all around me and I
could grasp nothing. I raged for what had been
mine--for some high estate out of which I had fallen
into degradation.... 51

After the appearance of The Lost Prince Williams happened to meet an old Green Bay friend who had read it,
Charles Robinson. Williams asked Robinson what he thought
of the book. Robinson replied, "It is admirably written . . . but
I don't believe a word of it." Williams immediately erupted
into laughter and came back with, "Nor do I
either."52
Eleazer Williams died August 28, 1858, in Hogansburg, New York, on the St. Regis Indian Reservation. Sunday, June
1, 1947, almost a century later, his bones were reburied at
Oneida, Wisconsin. They arrived in the small wooden box into
which they had been put as they were exhumed in New York.
Earl Wright, Director of the Neville Public Museum of Green
Bay, was allowed to take the bones from the small box,
rearticulate them in correct anatomical order in a large
roughbox, and photograph them.53 I had been
invited by Wright to help him in these activities, scraping and
brushing the still damp clay of the years from the bones of the
man Eleazer Williams. Separating the myth of Eleazer
Williams from the man will never be as easy. At the site of
Lost Dauphin State Park near De Pere the State of Wisconsin
has erected an official marker cast in metal which honors
both the man and the myth, saying:

In 1822 Williams led a delegation of New York
Indians to the Fox River Valley, hoping to set up an
Indian Empire in the West.... In 1841 the French
Prince de Joinville visited Williams at Green Bay,
giving rise to the belief he might be the 'Lost
Dauphin', son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
This story gained wide publicity in 1853 through
the book The Lost Prince by John H. Hanson.
Williams had scars like those borne by little Louis
XVII. Was he the Lost Dauphin?

NOTES

Robert Hall is Professor Emeritus of
Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Adjunct
Curator of Midwestern and Plains Archaeology at the Field Museum,
Chicago. He is an eighth generation native of Green Bay and a 1945
graduate of East High School. He received his doctorate in anthropology
from the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 1960. [Return to Top]

1. Williams 1981, 169. The story of the Deerfield raid is
summarized by Francis Parkman (1983, II, 373-398).

2. Wertenbaker 1947, 256; Hubbard 1677,
76.

3. Vaughan 1965, 104; Winthrop 1908, I,
118.

4. Williams 1981, 172. At the time of the Deerfield
Massacre the Protestant English had not yet adopted the
calendar reforms of Pope Gregory and the English year still
began on March 25 rather than on January 1. February 29 fell
in the year 1703 in the old style calendar and 1704 in the new
style, hence February 29, 1703/4.

5. Williams 1981, 178.

6. Williams 1981, 176.

7. Williams 1981, 190.

8. Caughnawaga was originally the name of a
Mohawk town in the Mohawk valley of New York and was
later applied to the settlement near Montreal. Many different
Iroquoian tribes came to be present at the Canadian
Caughnawage, but the Mohawk were especially numerous
(Fenton and Tooker 1978, 469-471).

9. Wight 1896, 137-138.

10. Buerger 1989, 117.

11. Buerger 1989.

12. Buerger 1989, 118-119.

13. Ellis 1856, 418; Wight 1896, 158 and 158n.

14. Buerger 1989, 120; Williams 1859.

15. Lossing 1869, 377n.

16. Lossing 1869, 875n.

17. Williams 1859, 81.

18. Hanson 1854, 266-267.

19. Muller 1960, 294-295.

20. Muller 1960, 50.

21. Ellis 1879, 357.

22. Wight 1896, 148. The interview with Eleazer
Williams' mother came about because of the presence on the
Caughnawaga Reserve in the fall of 1851 of a Mr. Parkman,
who was investigating local records for the light they might
shed on the stories then current about Williams as the Lost
Dauphin. Conceivably this was the historian Francis Parkman.

23. Bloomfield 1909, 146-147.

24. Ellis 1856, 420.

25. Ellis 1856, 421.

26. Hanson 1854, 297.

27. Buerger 1989, 127.

28. In 1824 Madeleine Jourdain Williams was
baptized by Bishop Hobart in New York and christened
Mary Hobart Williams (Wight 1896, 173). She died in her
cabin in the Town of Lawrence, Brown County, July 21,
1886. A small personal diary she kept may be found in the
regional archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin
located in the library of the University of Wisconsin--Green
Bay. In it she noted such things as the beginning of the maple
sugar camps as each winter came to a close.

29. Draper 1879, 367n-368n. See also Ellis 1876,
227228 for a description of the courtship of Eleazer Williams.

30. Hanson (1854, 300, 323) gives Williams'
affirmation that the land was owned by his wife prior to
marriage but does not explain why Williams' wife, a young
daughter in a large family, should have had so much land in her own right. Mrs.
Williams' family apparently had rights of some kind to the
land prior to the marriage because of their Menominee
connection, but that part known as the Williams Tract was
formally deeded over to Mrs. Williams herself by the
Menominees on August 22, 1825, over two years after her
marriage to Eleazer on March 3, 1823.
Before the Williams log cabin was reconstructed the
location and dimensions of the cabin were determined by
archaeological excavation by Warren L. Wittry, then of the
Museum of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

31. Wight 1896,172; Williams 1847,96. Joseph
Jourdain (1780-1866), a blacksmith born in Three Rivers,
Canada, came to Green Bay in 1798. In 1803 he married
Marguerite Gravelle whose father was Michel Gravelle, a
Canadian voyageur, and whose mother was the daughter of a
Menominee chief. Joseph and Marguerite Jourdain had eight
children, of whom Madeleine (later Mary) married Eleazer
Williams. See Wisconsin Historical Collections 3:253;
8:340n, 367n; 20:100n.

46. Ellis 1879, 349. Although in 1824 Williams gave
his year of birth as 1792 (Wis. Hist. Colls. 6:341n), which
would have made him seven years younger than the dauphin
(who was born March 27, 1785), by the 1850s Williams was
giving his birth year as 1784 to 1786, which was more
consistent with his pretensions at the time. Williams (1859,
54) wrote that he was fourteen to fifteen years old in the year
1800, which would put his birth in the year 1785 or 1786,
while in the Federal census of 1850 the Williams family was
enumerated on August 28 with Eleazer putting his age down
as 66 and his birth in Canada. That made 1784 his birth year.
In 1800 Eleazer's father indicated Eleazer's birthday was in
May of 1788 (Wight 1896, 151).

47. Smith 1872, 338.

48. Buerger 1989, 132.

49. Hanson 1854.

50. Wight 1896, 190.

51. Catherwood 1901, 30.

52. Draper 1879, 367; emphasis added.

53. The negatives were 4" x 5" in size made with a
press type camera. I have not seen the photographs
since 1947. I was not present at the actual reburying of
the bones, but I have been given to believe by someone
who was present that the bones may have been reburied
in the small box, which had a volume of no more than
three cubic feet, and not in the large roughbox, which had
a volume of around twenty cubic feet.